Sunday, October 16, 2011

This post is part of a Rolling Blog Tour--check out the other entries at the end

Actually, I hate this question—which is why I chose to write about it today. Plot or character? Both. They are intertwined and you can’t have a good mystery story without both. The events of the plot fuel reactions from the characters, and these reactions reveal human strengths and flaws that engage the reader. For example, in my first mystery, Bound for Eternity, Lisa Donahue finds a body in her museum’s mummy case at night. She keeps her cool long enough to get her daughter out of the way and call the police and, and then discovers her legs feel like cold linguini. She’s a good enough mom to want to protect her daughter, but she trembles with fear and horror when she realizes the dead body is that of a friend and colleague. Why is she messing around with a mummy after 5 pm? Because she’s just taken it for a CT scan at a local hospital. The mummy is the star of the plot, because everything revolves around it.

Just to make the question more complicated, one of the other “characters” is a also the setting: a creepy old attic museum with pigeons flying in and out of broken windows, no air conditioning, and an archaic security system. This attic museum, just like the one where I worked as a curator early in my career, inspired the story in the first place: it is such an delightful setting for a murder.

One of the villains in my third mystery, The Fall of Augustus, is The Boss Everyone Loves to Hate—a domineering woman who enjoys manipulating the emotions and actions of her primarily female staff. The sound of her high heels clack-clacking down the hall makes Lisa and her fellow employees flinch and shiver as they wonder what new public humiliation is in store. This character, like many obvious obnoxious people, fuels the plot because she generates hatred and fear—and the reader immediately wonders if she will be a murder victim.

The best villains are the ones who are not cardboard characters, but flesh-and-blood people with some redeeming characteristics as well as flaws. Their complicated pasts provide plot twists for the writer to explore, making the mystery a many-layered treat for the reader.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

This post is part of a rolling blog--see the list at the end for other writers who have posted on the same topic.
Conferences? Exhilarating, expensive, exhausting, but never a waste of time. At each one I’ve been to, I’ve made new friends and connections. And at one, Love is Murder in Chicago (every February) I connected with two of my current small press editors. Love is Murder celebrates the entire mystery genre from hard-boiled to cozy, with all things in between. We have the Poison Lady (a.k.a. Luci Zahray , a pharmacist in her day job) who teaches us how to poison our characters, and cops-turned-writers teaching us about crime scenes and guns. When these guys set up a mock crime scene, they give two prizes for interpretation: 1) most accurate, and 2) most creative…Other favorite conferences are Magna cum Murder , a lively weekend conference in Indiana in October, and Malice Domestic , a medium sized house party in Maryland/D.C. every late April. Unlike LIM, Malice attracts the writers of cozies and traditional whodunit mysteries, a la Agatha Christie (not surprisingly, the coveted Agatha award is a teapot).

The only conference I’ve attended in my pajamas, though, was an online mystery con sponsored by Poisoned Pen Press a few years ago. It was great fun—we had podcasts, chat rooms, video conferencing, and asynchronous posts on all the usual topics. People I met online later showed up in person at other cons.

What all of this conferences have in common is camaraderie and the joy of interacting with people. Since writing is a lonely business most of the time, writers love to mingle and swap experiences as well as meet fans, potential readers, editors, and agents. There’s another advantage: some editors and agents are so overwhelmed with submissions that they are choosing to accept manuscripts only from people they’ve met at conferences. And doing a pitch session (speed-dating for writers) is a great way to make that crucial connection.

Best of all, I come home happy and energized and convinced that I want to keep writing as long as I can hold a pen or tap on a keyboard.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Different kinds of writing feed into each other. On our recent trip to Alaska, our naturalist leaders suggested we use a “word of the day” to help collect our impressions. These words and phrases were supplemented with photos and sketches. I found this helpful, especially since the scenery was so stunning that I was initially at a loss for words. I enjoyed using words such as “frozen water,” “trail,” and the seemingly contradictory “wild quiet.” Some examples:

After whale-watching, during which I wore every layer I had against the rain and cold: "Tired tourists trail back to the Great Mother, who sucks them in through her great maw, filters them through her baleen, and spits on their hands." As anyone who has been on a cruise ship since 9-11 knows, filtering is the belt-removing, metal object-dumping security getting onto the cruise ship, spitting on the hands is the required hand sanitation.

A hike in Denali national park yielded few wild animal sightings but nice wildflowers until we came upon a chewed up aspen tree (moose tooth marks at about 8 feet above the round, surrounded by moose-trimmed bushes and a steaming pile of scat. After I got over my racing heart at the idea of being that close to an immense moose, I wrote: "Poor aspen, pale flesh exposed by a moose's love-bites. She shivers in the wild quiet."

I haven’t found words yet for the excursion we took flying over glaciers, mountains, and rounded foothills in a small plane.

Another unusual tip Susan gave us is paint chip poetry: you go into your favorite hardware store, wander over to the paint department as if you were choosing paint colors, and look at the labels on those little free cards you can take home. What great names to use in writing: “harvest brown,” “moon-glow silver, ” “southwest orange,” or perhaps “glacier blue.” A good place to go when you have writer’s block on some descriptive scene.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

I recently attended the wonderful "Love is Murder" con in Chicago, and was struck all over again by how publishing is changing. I sat in on several panels with publishers, editors, and agents representing such companies as Murder Ink, Five Star Mysteries, and the brand new Ampicellis Ebooks.

The theme of the conference seemed to be that despite the closing of brick and mortar stores, authors have more options than ever before. We heard Joe Konrath (The Kindle King) talk about his publishing model, now entirely electronic after having a traditional publisher and NY agent. True, we have more choices, but each one of us must think carefully about where she wants to be in the general scheme of things. Do you want to be a NY author with a NY agent and publishing company? Then the traditional route (hobnob at conferences, find an agent, hold out for a good deal) is probably the way to go. For many of us, though, it makes sense to explore smaller publishing companies that offer both trade paperback and ebook editions and a focus on online marketing.

It is an exciting time to be an author, and I am willing to try new roads to publication. Launching what I hope will be a new series (historical mysteries set in central Illinois), I plan to explore all the options. I sure hope my books can still be available in some kind of print--I definitely love the feel and heft of the physical book. and the smell of the paper...

Sarah's latest novel

"Catacomb," the search for Nazi looted art under Rome

Interview with Sarah Underhill Wisseman

How did you become a writer?My parents read to me when I was very little, and my father wrote two unpublished mysteries after he retired. My university job has always required writing, but I wrote mostly non-fiction until about 1998.

What is your background?I grew up in Evanston, IL and Weston, MA. Since college, I have worked as a museum curator, database manager, conservation lab assistant, field archaeologist, archaeological scientist, cook on an archaeological dig, and dorm mother. I majored in Anthropology as an undergraduate, and that’s when I fell in love with archaeology and museum work.

Your books are about archaeology and museums. Do you have experience in those areas?Yes. I’ve been on archaeological excavations in Israel, Italy, North Carolina, and Nevada. My museum experience began in college when I took a job as a museum guard at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Mass. Since then I have worked in five other museums in four different cities in registration, conservation, research, curation, tour-guiding, fund-raising, and database management.

Have you published other books?Yes. Five books of non-fiction on ancient Greek vases, Greek archaeology, scientific methods in archaeology, and Egyptian mummies.

How did you become an archaeologist?During my freshman year in college, a friend handed me a brochure about a summer archaeology program in Israel. I signed up and it changed my life. I went back for a junior year abroad, living in Tel Aviv and digging in the dessert around Beersheva and the Dead Sea area. I completed my graduate work (M.A. and Ph.D) at Bryn Mawr College in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology.

Is “Bound for Eternity” based on real life?Yes. At the University of Illinois, my colleagues and I conducted an investigation of an Egyptian mummy using X-ray, CT scanning, and other non-destructive analyses. I wrote about our results in several technical articles and then in a book for the general public called “The Virtual Mummy” which was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2003. The murder mystery grew out of that experience (of writing the non-fiction book).

Why Boston for your setting?I grew up in a Boston suburb and went to high school and college in that area. Although I have lived in Illinois for over twenty years, I wanted to return home to Boston in my books since it is one of my favorite cities. Also, Cape Cod was my parents’ home after they retired.

Is your museum real?No, but it is based upon a former attic museum at the University of Illinois.

Is “Dead Sea Codex” based on real life?Yes and no. The story and characters are fictional, but the settings of Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and the site of Masada are real and known to me from nearly two years of living and traveling in Israel in the 1970s.

Dead Sea Codex is a prequel for Bound for Eternity. Do you have plans for future books?Yes. The third book, "The House of the Sphinx," is based on my recent trip to Egypt and will include both archaeology and bioterrorism. “The Fall of Augustus” will be set in Boston again and begins with a death by falling statue. In a later book in the series I plan to move the setting to James Barber’s hospital and create a mystery using my husband’s medical background.

Have you won any awards for your writing?No, but I have placed in a couple of contests: I finaled in the 2004 St. Martin's Press/MALICE DOMESTIC CONTEST for the Best First Traditional Mystery Novel and won third place in the 2004 Leditslip contest for the Best Mystery Novel Proposal

About Me

Sarah Wisseman is a retired professional archaeologist, mystery writer, and painter. She has worked as a researcher and teacher for over thirty years at the University of Illinois. www.sarahwisseman.com